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New Scientist Live

Lima talks set up climate deal for a ‘bad outcome’

By Fred Pearce

China is the world’s biggest polluter

(Image: Paul Souders/Corbis)

The timetable is in tatters. Hopes of a successful climate deal in Paris next December suffered a setback at the UN climate summit in Lima, Peru, at the weekend as talks left the proposed timeline for a deal in pieces.

In particular, nations are now under no obligation to present detailed pledges of emissions cuts by March this year, as has been planned before Lima. The closing statement, the Lima Call for Climate Action, instead says countries are “invited” to “consider communicating their undertakings”, which “may include, as appropriate… quantifiable information”, and to send them in when they are “ready to do so”.

Even if countries do present detailed pledges before Paris, a plan to allow other nations to comment on them – to see if they measure up to the professed desire to limit global warming to 2 °C – was thrown out. China, India and others said such a review would infringe their sovereignty.

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Watered down

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon had asked the Lima conference to agree a draft text for Paris. Instead, it decided to “intensify its work” to deliver one before May.

Climate scientists left Lima feeling gloomy. The conclusion “is definitely watered down from what we expected”, said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the meeting.

It was “very important that [delegates] include rigorous and scientifically sound emissions information [in their] emissions pledges”, said Bill Hare of the think tank Climate Analytics in Berlin, Germany.

China, the world largest polluter, had recently pledged that its emissions would peak by 2030, but without saying what level that might be. Such detailed information “is fundamentally important to the likely level of global warming”, Hare said.

Grave concern

Policy specialists were no happier. “Twenty years of climate negotiations have shown that deferring critical decisions to the last minute often leads to a bad outcome,” said Mark Kenber, CEO of the Climate Group, which represents business leaders around the world who want a climate deal.

Delegates agreed a conference closing statement noting “with grave concern” the “significant gap” between informal pledges so far put on the table and the goal of limiting warming to 2 °C. But they had failed to address that gap.

The conference, like many climate negotiations before it, was beset by battles between rich and poor nations. Poor nations said they should be allowed to develop their economies unhindered by restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Most rich nations agreed with US secretary of state John Kerry, who told delegates that “today, more than half of emissions are coming from developing countries, so it is imperative that they act too”.

Economists also saw a conflict. A fair deal would concentrate the emissions cuts for rich nations, which have the highest per-capita emissions and have been emitting longer. But the cheapest cuts can be made in poor countries.

The obvious solution is to have the rich nations pay for emissions cuts in developing economies. In Lima, rich nations refused to put the money on the table. Without it, the Paris conference may fail as its predecessor did in Copenhagen five years ago.